The brief appearance of a staging site for the new home of Command & Conquer on the web revealed that the beloved real-time strategy franchise will be born again under a brand-new EA development studio, Jon Van Caneghem's Victory Games.

While the current Command & Conquer homepage is still online and fully-functional, a new site briefly appeared today at the URL Cncstage.com, seemingly outing a new development studio and all-new direction for the RTS series.

Victory Games, based in Los Angeles, Texas, and Shanghai, China, is headed up by Jon Van Caneghem, EA's head of all things Command and Conquer related. In an interview with Van Caneghem posted on the staging site, the new studio's boss outlined plans to work on "a AAA Command & Conquer game".

"I can tell you it's a Command & Conquer game for the PC, but we're not yet at a stage where I can go into any details- we'll be prepared to make a more formal announcement later in the year. We're not just working on a game, though. Our general focus is on the future of Command & Conquer. That means updating a lot of the core technology to create a stable base for future development, and leveraging that work on this first game."

Hopefully this isn't the social networking version of Command & Conquer Van Caneghem hinted at in November of 2009, but a full reboot that will breathe new life into the franchise.

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The staging website is now offline, likely due to the amount of attention it's received today. We've reached out to EA for comment on the story, and will update this post should we receive a response. It's not official until it's official, of course, but it sure looked pretty damn official to me.